e-book
For the past decade, three companies have been building full-fledged e-book ecosystems with devices, apps and digital bookstores all working perfectly together — Amazon, Rakuten and a tiny company called…
A lot of founders make the mistake of thinking that hiring a bunch of highly paid account executives (a fancy name for salespeople) is the same as “going enterprise.” It’s…
Amazon is… a company that could bear to have a bit better of an ethical track record. At the time of publication, warehouse workers in Staten Island are fighting for better…
Sales stand and fall on leads, but attracting prospects and optimally converting them into buyers is an art that many have yet to grasp.
While short videos are what drive ByteDance’s revenues and give the Chinese startup international recognition, the firm is expanding into numerous new areas like other tech giants to fuel growth.…
As a hardware startup, Astrohaus stands apart because of its unique offerings focused specifically on writers and writing. Its debut product, the Freewrite, looked like an old-school travel typewriter with…
Amazon unveils a new biometric ID technology, the Biden campaign takes aim at Facebook and iRobot’s co-founder joins a robotic gardening startup. This is your Daily Crunch for September 29,…
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The reMarkable 2 improves on the original in every way, but remains firmly in its niche
I’d been asking for something like the reMarkable for a long time before it showed up out of the blue a few years ago. The device was a real treat, but had a few problems and an eye-popping price tag. The reMarkable 2 builds on the first, with a more…
Apple is under formal investigation by antitrust regulators in European Union — following a number of complaints related to how it operates the iOS App Store and also its payment…
The National Emergency Library is one of those well-intentioned ideas that was destined to get pushback. The brainchild of Internet Archive, the platform made north of 1.3 million books available…
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Canceled conferences will force startups to focus on scalable lead generation
Forcing founders to wean themselves off conferences and events as a “go-to” business development tactic might not be a bad thing in the long run.
As companies that are used to having workers in the same building struggle to find ways to work from home, one company that has been remote from Day One is…
Perlego, the textbook subscription service, has raised $9 million in Series A funding. Backing the round is Charlie Songhurst, Dedicated VC, and Thomas Leysen (Chairman of Mediahuis and Umicore). Perlego’s…
Adobe ties up with Amazon to build D2C stores powered by Amazon’s commerce and fulfillment tools
E-commerce giant Amazon was built on the concept of a large marketplace that could be the home for all online shopping, whether it was for items and services it was…
Alexa devices just got a new use case: live customer service help. This morning, Amazon’s e-book company Audible announced the first live customer service experience on Alexa devices, activated through…
China’s new tech force Pinduoduo is continuing its race to upend the e-commerce space, even at the expense of its finances. The three-year-old startup earmarked some big wins from the…
Chinese startup ByteDance is finding itself surrounded by challengers as its empire of new media products, including global video app TikTok and Chinese news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, gather steam. Tencent…
Amazon posted its bi-annual report Thursday detailing the number of government data demands it receives. The numbers themselves are unremarkable, neither spiking nor falling in the second-half of last year compared to…
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Meet the little-known Chinese Wi-Fi startup that rubs shoulders with WeChat and Alipay
A service that connects people to Wi-Fi hotspots for free turned out to be one of China’s most popular apps, nestling in the top ranks with Tencent’s WeChat messenger and Alibaba’s digital wallet affiliate Alipay. According to a report from app tracking service App Annie, WiFi Master Key was China’s fifth-largest…
A few levels past the bestsellers and sci-fi/romance/adventure titles on Kindle Unlimited, in the darkest corners of the Kindle Direct Publishing market, there are books that are made entirely out…
The upcoming Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, in addition to making Microsoft move to reduce obscenity on its platform, has hit erotica authors on Amazon. After many authors saw their…
Pronoun, a self-publishing service for authors, is shutting down after promising free ebook distribution for authors. The company, which raised millions in funding and ended up being sold to Macmillan…
I like Digital Reader editor Nate Hoffelder. He is one of the few bloggers about publishing who doesn’t suck up to the industry, nor does he particularly gild the lily.…
It’s good news and bad news for the publishing industry. The good news is that print revenue was up 3.4 percent in April, primarily in trade paperbacks, with some solid…
If there’s one thing readers love it’s extra reading apps on their iOS and Android devices. A few years ago there were about a dozen – apps for long-form writing,…
People who have Kindles made before 2012 need to update their software by March 22 or lose Internet connectivity, Amazon announced. Procrastinators and people who missed the message will have…
Apple looks to have come to the end of the road in a long running legal saga involving allegations of an e-books price inflating conspiracy.
Flipkart, one of the biggest players in India’s booming e-commerce market, has conceded that there is one part of online retail it can’t win, and stopped selling e-books. Users who…
Metaphors about textual dark matter or a “Shadow” ebook industry actually fail to capture the dramatic nature of what is happening. Perhaps it would be better to say that a…
If you’re like me, you have a lot of Mad Magazine books from the 1970s, a classic copy of Oui from 1979, and three Hungarian cookbooks. In other words, you’re…